Читать книгу Thomas Quick - Hannes Råstam - Страница 14

APPOJAURE

MARINUS AND JANNY Stegehuis from the Netherlands were a childless couple aged thirty-four and thirty-nine respectively. For three years they had been saving up for their dream holiday in the Nordic Alps and in the summer of 1984 it was finally going to happen.

On 28 June they left their home in the town of Almelo at dawn and drove without stopping to Ödeshög in Östergötland, where some relatives of Marinus lived. They were on a tight budget and couldn’t afford overnight stays in hotels. After spending three days in Ödeshög, they continued their journey to Finland, where they had friends whom they knew from a church choir.

When Janny and Marinus left Mustasaari in Österbotten they pointed their Toyota Corolla north, towards the real adventure. They went across Nordkalotten via North Cape and then down through the Swedish Alps, where they planned to live in the wilderness and take each day as it came. They looked forward to fishing, experiencing the wildlife and photographing nature.

The journey was harder than they had anticipated due to a great deal of rain, wind and temperatures close to freezing. They were plagued by mosquitoes. But things were to get even worse. An engine problem outside Vittangi resulted in two tows, a night in a hotel and expensive repairs in a garage.

With empty pockets they left Kiruna and headed south. On the evening of 12 July they put up their tent on the tip of a spit at the northern end of Lake Appojaure. Janny wrote in her diary:

Drove to Sjöfallets National Park. Beautiful surroundings. Took some photos. Filmed reindeer and saw a stoat at the roadside. Put up the tent at 16.30 on some wooded land. The mosquitoes continue to torment us. From Kiruna went 150 km in drizzling rain. Then it cleared up. Now it’s raining.

They rigged up their gas stove outside the tent flap so they had some shelter from the rain while preparing a simple meal of sausages and green beans.

Just before midnight on Friday, 13 July, the police in Gällivare received a call from Matti Järvinen, a resident of Gothenburg holidaying in the Swedish mountains, who reported that he had chanced upon a dead person in a tent at a picnic spot next to Lake Appojaure. Detective Inspector Harry Brännström and senior officer Enar Jakobsson set off at once and after driving eighty kilometres through the rain in the bright northern summer night they reached the place the tourist had described. Before long they found a collapsed two-man tent. Carefully they raised the poles at the short end and unzipped the flap. The scene that met their eyes was described in the police report:

By the long wall on the west side lies the corpse of a man. He is estimated to be between 30 and 40 years old. The body is on its back. [. . .] The heaviest bloodstains are on the face and around the neck and on the right shoulder. A dense area of absorbed blood is on the right side of the jumper by the sleeve seam at nipple level. Other visible parts of the jumper are bloodstained. The dead man has stab wounds or slashes to his right upper arm, to the left side of his throat as well as to the right of his breast beside the nipple. There is what looks like a contusion across his mouth. [. . .]

To the right of the man, as viewed from the tent flap, lies the dead body of a woman. Her head, the right cheek resting against the floor of the tent, lies alongside the man’s hip. The body is lying on its right side and is bent to an angle of almost 90 degrees. The left arm is extended and rests at an angle of about 45 degrees from the upper body. The upper parts of the body are wrapped in a patterned duvet cover of the same kind as the one the man lies in. The duvet cover is very heavily bloodstained.

Outside the tent the police found what might have been the murder weapon – a thin-bladed fillet knife made by Falcon, a Swedish manufacturer. The blade had snapped off and was later found between the woman’s arm and body. It had broken when the knife struck bone with great force.

Between the tent’s opening and the lake a grey-green Toyota Corolla with Dutch number plates was parked. The car was locked, the interior was in good order and there was no sign of unlawful entry.

The police were quickly able to identify the victims. The crime scene gave a strong indication that this had been the work of a lunatic, pure and simple.

The following day the bodies were transported to Umeå, where the medical examiner Anders Eriksson made a thorough forensic examination. In two autopsy reports he describes a very large number of stab and slash wounds.

The investigators concluded that the murderer had stabbed the sleeping couple in a frenzied fashion through the fabric of the tent. Both the woman and the man had woken during the attack – they had defensive wounds on their arms – but neither of them had even been able to get out of their sleeping bags. The incident itself must have happened very quickly.

The news of the murder shook the whole country. Perhaps the worst part of it was the cowardice of whoever had sneaked up on an unknown, wholly defenceless couple in their sleep; or perhaps it was the anonymous, faceless nature of the attack, with the knife stabbing through the thin canvas of the tent, making it impossible for the victims to understand what was happening or see who was attacking them; or was it the frenzy revealed by the large number of wounds? All the evidence at the scene pointed to a perpetrator without any kind of motive. The double murder of the Stegehuises was so strange and twisted in every respect, the only explanation was that it must have been committed by someone unfathomably sick.

The brutal crime in the Swedish wilderness also attracted a good deal of attention outside the country. In the police investigation that followed, more than a thousand people were questioned without any progress being made.

When lengthy murder inquiries are solved it is usually found that the perpetrator has made an appearance somewhere in the investigation documents, but in this case there was no trace of the man who confessed to the crime ten years later. Another fact puzzling the investigators was that Thomas Quick – who up until that point had been known as a murderer only of boys – was confessing to the brutal knife killing of a couple in their thirties.

In the first police interview, held on 23 November 1994, Quick described taking a train from Falun to Jokkmokk, a place he was familiar with from his time as a student at the High School in the academic year 1971–2. He stole a bicycle from outside the Sami Museum and rode off without any particular destination in mind. By coincidence he ended up on the road known as Vägen Västerut, which runs from Porjus towards Stora Sjöfallet.

At the picnic spot by Appojaure he caught sight of the Stegehuises, then later that night he attacked them with a hunting knife he had brought with him.

Quick’s account was vague. He even explicitly stated that he wasn’t absolutely certain that he had had anything to do with the murder. What made him doubt it, he said, was the nature of the violence, and also because one of the victims was a woman.

In his second interview Quick changed his story, bringing in a second man whom he had arranged to meet in Jokkmokk. This accomplice was a well-known hardened criminal named Johnny Farebrink, whose name, unlike Quick’s, had already cropped up in the investigation.

Thomas Quick claimed that they had driven in Farebrink’s Volkswagen pickup to Appojaure, where together they stabbed the Stegehuises to death. More interviews followed and Quick’s story grew more detailed. Quick told the police that he had met with a school friend from his old high school and that he and Johnny had visited another person in his home in Porjus.

The news that Thomas Quick had an accomplice in the murder of the Stegehuises was picked up by the newspapers. At the time, Johnny Farebrink was serving a ten-year sentence for another murder, and when Expressen asked him to comment on Quick’s accusation, he responded, ‘This is bloody rubbish! I don’t know this guy. I’ve never met him.’

However, four months into the investigation, prosecutor van der Kwast was convinced. ‘Thomas Quick’s confession corresponds with the facts established by the murder investigation,’ he said in an interview with Expressen on 23 April 1995. ‘I can only say that the deeper we dig into this story, the more certain we are that Thomas Quick is not lying or fantasising. Thomas Quick was in the vicinity of Appojaure when the murders took place and he had local knowledge from his time as a student at the folk high school in Jokkmokk.’

Thomas Quick had now confessed to seven murders, which – if he was telling the truth – would make him Sweden’s worst serial killer. Two highly experienced police officers from the Palme Unit, which was investigating the murder of the late prime minister, were transferred to the Quick case, including the chief officer, Hans Ölvebro. The inquiry was now of the very highest priority.

On 9 July a specially chartered private jet took off from Arlanda bound for Gällivare. In luxurious armchairs sat Thomas Quick, his therapist Birgitta Ståhle, the public prosecutor Christer van der Kwast, the memory expert Sven Åke Christianson, and a number of other officers and care assistants. The purpose of the trip was to carry out a reconstruction of the murder of the Stegehuises.

Also on the plane was Gunnar Lundgren, Quick’s lawyer. Considering the fact that this was now a high-profile and important criminal investigation, a county barrister like Lundgren no longer seemed appropriate. After conferring with Seppo Penttinen and Christianson, the decision had been made that Quick should switch to Claes Borgström, the celebrity lawyer. Borgström accepted the brief, but he was at the very beginning of a five-week holiday. For this reason Gunnar Lundgren had been reluctantly invited to take his place in one of the plane’s leather seats.

The following day Thomas Quick guided the investigators towards Porjus and Vägen Västerut, eventually turning off the forest path to the picnic spot by Appojaure. Here, police technicians had set up the crime scene to look exactly as it did on the night of 13 July 1984. Hans Ölvebro and Detective Inspector Anna Wikström took part in preparing the scene. The gas stove, sleeping bags and other props were arranged just as they had been found after the murders. A specially ordered tent from the Netherlands, exactly like the one in which the Stegehuises had slept on the night of the murders, had been erected at the edge of the forest. Inside, Ölvebro lay in Marinus Stegehuis’s place on the left and Wikström in Janny Stegehuis’s place on the right.

Armed with a stick as a knife, Thomas Quick sneaked up to the tent. He threw himself at it and stabbed in a frenzied manner at the canvas, before making his way inside through the opening. He grunted and roared while Anna Wikström, genuinely terrified, called for help. Quick was overpowered and the reconstruction was brought to a halt.

His actions did not in any way correspond with the known facts of the sequence of events.

After a break, the reconstruction recommenced and now Thomas Quick performed with great concentration and in accordance with the known facts. He calmly described to Penttinen every lunge he made with the knife, while also outlining his collaboration with his accomplice, Johnny Farebrink. He demonstrated how the long tear had been made in the short end of the tent, through which he had made his way inside.

Seven hours later, when the reconstruction was over, both the investigators and the prosecutor expressed their satisfaction with the outcome. Van der Kwast was quoted in Expressen on 12 July saying, ‘It’s gone very, very well.’ He now held the view that Thomas Quick had convincingly shown in the reconstruction that he really had murdered the Dutch couple: ‘He was both willing and able to show in great detail how the murders happened.’

An increasing number of real and self-proclaimed experts set out to explain the experiences and circumstances that had turned the boy, Sture Bergwall, into the sadistic serial killer known as Thomas Quick. Kerstin Vinterhed, a highly respected journalist who wrote for Dagens Nyheter, described his childhood home as a place ‘entirely silent and cut off from the outside world. It was a home where no one visited, where no children were ever seen playing nearby.’

Again, Quick’s childhood was covered – including his father’s rapes, his mother’s cruelty and the two murder attempts against him. His transformation into a murderer was thought to have happened after his father’s last assault, which took place in the forest when Thomas Quick was thirteen. Thomas wanted to kill his father, but changed his mind when he saw how pathetic he looked with his trousers around his ankles.

‘And then I ran away. And it’s like a single, giant step from that moment to the murder I committed in Växjö six months later when I was fourteen,’ Quick explained.

‘So it was as if you were killing yourself, was it?’ Kerstin Vinterhed wondered.

‘Yes, I was killing myself,’ Quick confirmed.

There was a belief that during this murder, just as with all the others, Thomas Quick was both the assailant and the victim. The murders were in actual fact a sort of re-enactment of the assaults to which he had been subjected in his childhood. This was the theoretical model used in the psychotherapeutic treatment of Quick and was also a method approved by the investigators.

Thomas Quick’s siblings, nephews and nieces responded with powerless shame to the horrifying accounts in the media of the parents’ dreadful cruelty. The Bergwall family no longer talked about Sture. If necessary, he was referred to as ‘TQ’. Sture Bergwall did not exist.

They maintained their silence for a long time. But in 1995 the oldest son, Sten-Ove Bergwall, stepped forward as the family’s spokesman. In the book Min bror Thomas Quick (‘My Brother, Thomas Quick’) he gave his version of what it was like to grow up in their family home. He spoke for the whole family when he called into question his brother’s traumatic childhood memories.

‘I don’t doubt that it seems true to him. It’s a known tendency for people to be encouraged to produce false memories in therapy,’ he said to Expressen, with firm assurances that his parents could not have been guilty of what Thomas Quick was alleging.

Sten-Ove explained that his purpose in writing the book was not to make money, but rather to reclaim the childhood that Thomas Quick had taken from him by the statements he had made. He also wanted to clear the names of his late parents, as they weren’t able to defend themselves against Quick’s accusations.

‘I’m not suggesting that we grew up in a perfect family, but none of us siblings have memories that back up his story. We were not a bunch of people living in isolation, we were not rejected and mysterious. We socialised with people, we travelled a lot and visited relatives at weekends, at Christmas and on birthdays.’

However, when it came to the murders that Thomas Quick had confessed to, Sten-Ove had no doubts: ‘When I heard that a man had confessed to the murder of Johan Asplund, I knew instinctively that it was my brother. And I was sure that more things would come to light.’

The trial for the Appojaure murders began in January 1996 at Gällivare District Court. At the trial in Piteå, Thomas Quick had insisted on closed doors while he was being cross-examined, but in Gällivare he conducted himself with great confidence in the courtroom. In front of an audience he accounted for the murder of the Dutch couple in a convincing manner. He described how he had taken a train to Jokkmokk, wanting to find a teenage boy, and there he met a group of German youths and selected one of the boys as his victim.

On a stolen women’s bicycle he had cycled to Domus supermarket, where he met Johnny Farebrink, a ‘gruesome and deeply depressed knife-lunatic’. After a drinking session they had gone together to Appojaure, where the Stegehuises were camping. According to Quick, their reason for going was that Johnny Farebrink had ‘aversions’ to the Dutch couple, while Quick was keen to target the German boy he had met in Jokkmokk, and got the impression that the boy was the Dutch couple’s son.

‘When I asked her directly, the woman denied her own son. I was furious,’ Quick told the court.

The murder of the couple, which had earlier seemed inexplicable, was now revealing a certain underlying logic, though a crazily contorted one.

‘I tried to lift her up so her face was right in front of mine. I wanted to see her fear before she died,’ Quick went on. ‘But I didn’t really have the strength, so I just stabbed and stabbed.’

Counsel Claes Borgström asked Quick what had turned him against the woman.

‘Because of her denial, I identified her with M, and there was also a physical resemblance,’ answered Quick.

M was Quick’s name for his mother. The murder was thus a murder of his own mother.

A relative of the Stegehuises, with whom the couple stayed in the first few days of their holiday, had come to Gällivare in order to try and understand why Janny and Marinus had been killed. After listening to Quick’s account of the double murder, the relative made a statement to Expressen: ‘Quick is a pig, he doesn’t deserve to live.’

The outcome of the trial for the murders in Appojaure was hardly a foregone conclusion. There were questions about a number of aspects of Thomas Quick’s story, especially concerning the information about an accomplice. The investigators had not found anything or anyone to back up Quick’s information about Johnny Farebrink: no one had seen them together and the drinking session they allegedly indulged in was denied by everyone who was present. For these reasons he was not a co-defendant in the case.

A local artist who had been a student at the same high school as Quick in the 1970s did testify that she was almost sure she had seen him at the train station in Gällivare at the time of the murders in Appojaure.

The district court also believed that Quick’s presence in Jokkmokk on the day before the murder was confirmed by the testimony of the owner of a stolen bicycle. She said that the bicycle’s gears were broken in precisely the way that Quick had described.

Seppo Penttinen, who had conducted all the interviews with Quick, testified in court as to the reasons why Quick had constantly changed his story over the course of the investigation. It was because Quick ‘had to protect his inner self by inventing something that verged on the truth’. Yet the central aspects of Quick’s memories were clear and distinct, according to Penttinen.

Sven Åke Christianson explained Quick’s difficulties in remembering his murders and described two contradictory mechanisms in the function of human memory. Remembering what harms us is, on the one hand, an important survival mechanism. On the other hand, we cannot constantly ‘go round remembering all the misery we’ve been through’. It is important to be able to forget, Christianson asserted.

Thomas Quick’s memory function had been examined by Christianson, who concluded that it was absolutely normal. He claimed that there wasn’t anything to suggest that this might be a case of a false confession.

A medical examiner and forensic technician gave convincing testimony that Quick had described all the most serious injuries sustained by the Stegehuises during questioning, and that his story had been confirmed by forensic evidence found at the scene.

The district court was also impressed by Seppo Penttinen’s account of how Quick had been able to describe the murder scene in the very first interviews, and stated in its summing-up: ‘On the basis of what we have seen, the district court finds beyond any reasonable doubt that Quick is guilty of these crimes. The circumstances of the crimes are such that it must be considered as murder.’

Thomas Quick had now been found guilty of three murders. But the investigation was still in its very infancy.